As Black Panther continues to smash box office records—its $242.1 million four-day opening weekend was the second-highest of all-time, as well as the biggest debut by an African-American director—it's also on track to become one of the most-talked-about sci-fi films ever among urbanists and city planners.

"Probably no movie has been more discussed in the context of utopian or dystopian city-making than 1982's Blade Runner,” urbanist and Vancouver’s former chief planner Brent Toderian tells Architectural Digest. “It’s still being discussed decades later. Blade Runner wasn’t a positive vision of Los Angeles, but it was an interesting vision. It was a cautionary tale, but also a fun conversation starter. I think Black Panther's Wakanda can be that new conversation.”

A lot of the buzz since the film's release has been around Wakanda, the movie's fictional East African nation, becoming a reality. Obviously, a Wakanda-like kingdom ruled by a monarch who has superpowers isn’t going to spring up out of nowhere, but urbanists and city-planning experts agree that some of the design and infrastructure of the fictional place have real-life possibilities.

In Wakanda’s capital city, for example, pedestrians walk along commerce-filled streets that are car-free except for the occasional appearance of small buslike shuttles. It’s quite similar to the Woonerf Concept, an approach to public space design started in the Netherlands in the 1970s. “It’s this idea that streets in the cities should be primarily devoted to pedestrians,” says Yonah Freemark, a PhD student in city planning at MIT who runs the transit website The Transport Politic.

And Wakanda, Freemark added, “inspires us to think differently about what we want our public spaces to look like. I think it’s quite possible to have streets in the United States look like this in the future. Maybe not the maglev trains that are in Black Panther, but you certainly can see streets becoming focused on people rather than cars, streets where people are just able to walk in the middle of them without the fear of being run over.” Halfway there, perhaps, is Manhattan’s High Line, an elevated park and walkway built on a former freight rail line on the city’s west side, running 1.45 miles from Gansevoort Street to W. 34th Street.

An overhead view of Wakanda's diverse architecture and layout.

It's never fully explained in Black Panther what the maglev trains—or high-speed trains that run on magnets supported by a magnetic field—are used for, but the audience sees them zipping above and around the city. Could they be carrying passengers throughout the kingdom à la Amtrak, or are they simply commuter trains?

While their use remains unclear in this Marvel universe (something many viewers of the film have wondered about on social media), maglev trains are already up and running in South Korea and Germany, among other countries. However, it can be assumed that Wakanda’s fictional natural resource, vibranium, makes the futuristic city's trains accelerate and decelerate at speeds unattainable in the real world. Wakanda also happens to be the wealthiest country in the world; therefore, its ruler, T’Challa, doesn’t have to worry about the cost to develop and operate maglev technology, something many actual cities interested in the idea face when considering the feasibility of the transportation.

In Wakanda, culture and technology co-exist.

Then there is Wakanda’s cityscape. Unlike most superhero movies, where cities are filled with futuristic glass-and-steel towers reaching into and above the clouds, Wakanda’s architecture comes in all shapes, sizes, and materials. “They didn’t make everything gleaming and shiny,” says Charisma Acey, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at UC-Berkeley whose fieldwork includes Africa and South America. “It does offer an alternative for what future cities could be like in Africa.”

Wakandan buildings incorporate traditional African elements, including thatch roofs and hanging gardens on some of their tallest structures. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Wakanda and the eco-cities that are emerging across Africa,” Acey said. “There has been an influx of capital since 2000 into the continent, creating satellite cities and central cities. It’s happening in West Africa, East Africa, and even in southern Africa.”

Toderian adds, “There’s density in Wakanda, but it doesn't seem oppressive. I immediately saw urbanism at all scales. I saw tall towers, I saw midrise towers, and I saw human-scale urbanism. It looks like regional architecture as opposed to this anywhere-ness that we seem to have in our global architecture these days. I saw architectural expression that was not only organic, but of its place and of its culture.”

But Toderian says he couldn’t help but notice what he says is a glaring omission in the wonder that is Wakanda: bicycles.

“What I saw in the general imagery was it wasn’t just a reliance on technology,” he said. “I’d be disappointed in an urban vision that seems to suggest that technology will solve all of our problems. There’s simple technology like bikes. With the density and mixed use of the city, bikes should be an option because things may be too far to walk to but close enough to use a bike. Any futuristic, high-tech nation would also understand urban health and presumably be about walkability and bikeability.”

Still, Black Panther's release—and with it, the introduction of comic artisan Jack Kirby's Wakanda to mainstream audiences—has created a conversation among experts and viewers about the possibilities of high-tech cities retaining human idiosyncrasy. "The question is whether we as a society want to be inspired to create a new type of environment for where we want to live or whether we just want to reinforce what we already have," Freemark says. "What's cool about Wakanda is that it's presenting this alternative vision of how cities could look and be run."

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